Students cheating in class is nothing new. When we think of old school cheating, we picture one student looking over another student’s shoulder during a test or students passing notes in class. Nowadays, with the help of modern technology, there are many, many more creative ways for students to cheat.

Reddit user Deaster12 asked, “Teachers and Professors of Reddit what is the cleverest (or dumbest) way you’ve seen a student cheat?” The answers are pretty interesting and vary widely. Warning, if you have kids who are still in school, you may not want them to read this so they don’t get any ideas about how to cheat in class.

1. The File Name

   Reddit user Lauren_the_lich discovered an easy way to find the right answers:

   In my aquatics class we had a test on the computer where we had to identify like 50 fish. I had no idea what any of the fish were so I was panicking and looking for clues. I found that if you clicked save as then it would show the file name, which was the name of the fish.

2. Hearing Aid

   Written by Reddit user stev0205:

   In middle school I had a math teacher who wore a hearing aid, and boy, this thing must have been a piece of shit. It would constantly start ringing from feedback or something, and after a month or so we learned that he couldn’t hear shit when it was ringing.So when the next test comes up, the ringing starts about 10 minutes in. All we had to do was keep staring down at the tests, and read the question out loud, and he couldn’t hear us. This went on for the rest of the year. It also took me until my sophomore year in college to catch up for all the things I missed in that class… Before that math was my best subject. I learned a very valuable lesson.

3. Really Nice Fellow Student

   Reddit user Rasta_Lance shared:

   I remember on a middle school history final the teacher had peers grade each other’s papers. Luckily some cool kid that I barely talked to (but gave gum too on several occasions) got my test and changed all the answers I got wrong. I got 100%

4. Under the Tights

   Written by Stale_Eric:

   The girls at my school had it covered. They put on black tights with the information all over their legs….. Couldn’t see it when the tights were slack…. Stretch it out however and all was revealed. Sneaky!!

5. Wikipedia

   DrTenochtitlan shared a dumb way his students cheat:

   Dumbest way? I’ve had students turn in term papers that were completely cut and pasted from Wikipedia. Now, I’m sure that happens a lot. What is particularly funny and unusual is when they’re so dumb, they don’t realize to take out the hyperlinks in the text and they use a color printer, so every fifth word is blue.

6. Good Catch by the Teacher

   Shared by another_sunnyday:

   One of my college professors told a story about a student who e-mailed him a word document filled with random symbols, to make it seem as though the file was corrupted, so he could have more time writing his paper. This professor was very tech savvy, and figured it out pretty quick.

7. Long Hair Helps

   Written by dinosaur_chunks:

   Girl recorded the answers to a test on an mp3 player. She ran a single headphone up her shirt, taped it to the back of her neck, and then to her ear.The thing is, she wore her hair the same way every day. It went just past her shoulders, so her hair hid everything perfectly and she looked no different than she did any other day. It worked flawlessly.

8. Shakespeare

   Reddit user Egun shared another dumb idea:

   Task: to write a sonnet.Student hands in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 125 claiming it is his own work.

9. Smart Watch

   Reddit user alwayslurkeduntilnow wrote:

   Happened this year. Not the first time I have posted this.Kid sat at the back of the exam hall, all pupil bags piled up at the back. One bag keeps beeping as messages come in. Regulations state bag must be removed and phone investigated. Phone is receiving texts with the answers to the exam being sat. Pupil in question has galaxy smart watch on. He takes photo of questions with his watch when he knows he is not being observed. Watch auto syncs with phone which auto dropboxes his photo. Parent at the other end then accessing dropbox to see questions and replying with answers. Phone sends text message to the watch. Kid fucked up and was caught because he forgot to put his phone on silence. Was a mock exam. I still don’t know if they were doing this as a trial run or were just a little dumb.

10. The Whole Class Was in on It

    Written by joejackson62:

    I helped my AP politics class develop a foolproof method for cheating. Our teacher would hand out a test each week, and make us write the multiple choice answers on a blank piece of paper with our name and date on it. After the test was done, we would hand the answer sheet to the kid behind us (last kid in the row handed his to the first kid in the same row) to grade it. The teacher would go over the questions orally and give us the correct answers.I told each kid in the class to write the answer as a lower case “c”. If the answer was a, you close the loop and make a lower case “a”, and so on and so forth for “b” and “d”. Obviously, if the answer was “c”, you’d leave it alone. We all also agreed that no one should get a perfect score. We had to always get 2 or 3 wrong answers to make the con work. The teacher could never believe we were perfect, and he wasn’t able to figure out everyone was getting higher test scores. We left the “wrong answers” up to the kid who was marking our paper. It worked surprisingly well. No kids snitched because we were all riding the good grades gravy train.

11. Not Admitting Guilt No Matter What

    Reddit user biiigsister shared:

    My favorite was a student turning in a short story that was the lyrics to “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and trying to claim it was original work. He insisted he’d written it, despite me playing the original song for him.